RFK granddaughter dies; police awaiting toxicology reports

FILE – In this June 6, 2000 file photo, Robert F. Kennedy’s granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill places a white rose at the Eternal Flame, President John F. Kennedy’s gravesite, at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. Hill, has died at the age of 22. The Kennedy family released a statement on Thursday night, Aug. 1, 2019, following reports of a death at the family’s compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Hill was the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s fifth child, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill. (AP Photo/Hillery Smith Garrison, File)

BOSTON (AP) — Authorities said Friday they are looking to toxicology reports for clues to the death of Saoirse Kennedy Hill, the 22-year-old granddaughter of assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

The Kennedy family confirmed the death in a statement after police responded to a call Thursday afternoon about a possible drug overdose at the storied Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The statement was issued by Brian Wright O’Connor, a spokesman for Saoirse Hill’s uncle, former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II.

Hill was the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s fifth child, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill, who was one of four people falsely convicted in the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombings of two pubs. The two are now divorced.

“She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit,” the statement said, adding she was passionate about human rights and women’s empowerment and worked with indigenous communities to build schools in Mexico.

Hill, whose first name is pronounced SIR-shuh, attended Boston College, where she was a member of the class of 2020. The college issued a statement Friday saying she was a communications major and “a gifted student.”

“She was also active in the College Democrats, and had many friends on the BC campus,” spokesman Jack Dunn said.

The Cape & Islands district attorney’s office said Barnstable police responded to a home “for a reported unattended death.” Barnstable police and Massachusetts State Police detectives were investigating. The district attorney’s office said Friday that Hill was taken to Cape Cod Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. It said an autopsy showed no signs of trauma, and that toxicology reports would help determine the cause and manner of death.

The family statement did not include a cause of death, but audio of a Barnstable police scanner call obtained by The Associated Press said officers were responding to a report of a drug overdose at the compound.

“The world is a little less beautiful today,” the Kennedy family statement quoted Hill’s 91-year-old grandmother and RFK’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, as saying.

Hill had written frankly and publicly about her struggles with mental health and a suicide attempt while in high school. “My depression took root in the beginning of my middle school years and will be with me for the rest of my life,” she wrote in a February 2016 column in The Deerfield Scroll, the student newspaper at Deerfield Academy, the elite private school in Massachusetts she attended.

Hill wrote that she became depressed two weeks before her high school junior year started and she “totally lost it after someone I knew and loved broke serious sexual boundaries with me.” She wrote that she pretended it hadn’t happened, and when it became too much, “I attempted to take my own life.”

She urged the school to be more open about mental illness.

Hill also helped found a group at the school called Deerfield Students Against Sexual Assault, according to a November 2016 story in the paper, and she attended a March for Our Lives gun violence prevention rally in Barnstable in March 2018, The Barnstable Patriot newspaper reported at the time.

Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles in 1968 after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. He had served as attorney general in the administration of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. He also served as a U.S. senator from New York.

RFK’s family, like the rest of the Kennedy clan, has been touched by tragedy.

One of his and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, Michael Kennedy, was killed in a skiing accident in Colorado on New Year’s Eve 1997 at age 39. And in 1984, another son, David Anthony Kennedy, died of a drug overdose in Florida at age 28.

JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., was killed with his wife and sister-in-law when his small plane crashed off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in July 1999.

One of Hill’s relatives, former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who is now an advocate for substance abuse and mental health treatment, tweeted in tribute to her Friday.

“Saoirse will always remain in our hearts. She is loved and will be deeply missed,” he wrote.

Funeral plans were incomplete Friday.

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Associated Press reporter Mark Pratt in Boston contributed.

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